Dostoyevsky, The Man Behind: Memoirs, Letters & Autobiographical Works. Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Lithuanian W. St. Vidunas in this connection : 7

      7 See his La Lituanie dans le passk et dans le present.

      "Formerly many well-to-do Lithuanians had but one desire : to see one or more of their sons enter upon an ecclesiastical career. They gladly provided the funds necessary to prepare them for such a calling. But they had no sympathy with studies of a more general character, and were averse from the adoption of any other liberal profession by the sons. Even of late years many young Lithuanians have had to suffer greatly from parental obstinacy. Their fathers have refused them the money necessary for advanced secular studies, when they have declined to become ecclesiastics. Thus many lives of the highest promise have been wrecked."

      These words of Vidunas probably give the key to the extraordinary quarrel of my grandfather Mihail with his parents, which broke all the ties between our Moscovite family and the Ukrainian family of my greatgrandfather Andrey. The latter perhaps wished his son to pursue an ecclesiastical career, while the young man had a vocation for medicine. Seeing that his father would not pay for his medical studies, my grandfather fled from his home. We must admire the truly Norman energy of this youth of fifteen who entered an unknown city without money or friends, managed to get a superior education, made a good position for himself in Moscow, brought up a family of seven children, gave dowries to his three daughters and a liberal education to his four sons. My grandfather had good reason to be proud of himself, and to quote himself as an example to his children.

      Andrey Dostoyevsky's wish to see his son a priest was not, indeed, very extraordinary, for the Ukrainian clergy has always been highly distinguished. The Ukrainian parishes enjoyed the right to select their own priests, and naturally only men of blameless life were chosen. As to the higher ecclesiastical dignities, they were nearly always held by members of the Ukrainian nobihty, which was very rarely the case in Greater Russia, where the priests are an isolated caste. Stepan Dostoyevsky must have been a man of good family and good education or he could not have become an Episcopus. The Archbishop or Episcopus is the highest dignity in the Orthodox Church, for we have no Cardinals. After the abolition of the Patriarchate, the Archbishops managed the affairs of our church, each in turn taking part in the deliberations of the Holy Synod.

      We have yet another proof that the Ukrainian Dostoyevsky were intellectuals. Friends who had lived in Ukrainia told us that they had once seen there an old book, a kind of Almanach or poetical Anthology published in Ukrainia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Among the poems in this book there was a little bucolic piece written in Russian and gracefully composed. It was not signed, but the first letters of each line formed the name Audrey Dostoyevsky. Was it the work of my great-grandfather or of some cousin ? I know not, but it proves two things of great interest to the biographers of Dostoyevsky :

      1. First, that his Ukrainian ancestors were intellectuals, for in Ukrainia only the lower and middle classes speak Ukrainian, a pretty and poetic, but also an infantile and somewhat absurd language. The upper classes in Ukrainia habitually spoke Polish or Russian, and accordingly last year, when the country separated from Russia and proclaimed its independence, the new Hetman, Scoropadsky, had to post up eloquent appeals, which said : " Ukrainians ! learn your native tongue ! " The Hetman himself probably did not know a word of it.

      2. That poetic talent existed in my father's Ukrainian family and was not the gift of his Moscovite mother, as Dostoyevsky's literary friends have suggested.

      The interesting and varied history of Lithuania had a great influence in the formation of my father's powers. We find in his works traces of all the transformations Lithuania has undergone in the course of centuries. My father's character was essentially Norman : very honest, very upright, frank and bold. Dostoyevsky looked danger in the face, never drew back before peril, pressed on to his goal unweariedly, brushing aside all the obstacles in his path. His normanised ancestors had bequeathed to him an immense moral strength which is rarely found among Russians, a young, and consequently a weak race. Other European nations also contributed to the formation of Dostoyevsky's genius. The Knights of the Teutonic Order gave to his ancestors, their idea of the State and of the family.

      In Dostoyevsky's works, and stiU more in his private life, we find innumerable mediaeval ideas. In their turn the Catholic clergy of Lithuania, the leaders of whom came from Rome, taught my father's ancestors discipline, obedience, and a sense of duty, which can hardly be said to exist in the youthful and anarchic Russian nation. The Latin Schools of the Jesuits formed their minds. Dostoyevsky learned to speak French very quickly, and preferred it to German, though he knew German so well that he proposed to his brother Mihail that they should collaborate in translating Goethe and Schiller. My father had evidently the gift of languages, which is very rare among the Russians. Europeans generally say: " The Russians can speak all tongues." They do not, however, notice that those among my compatriots who speak and write French and German well all belong to Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian families, whose ancestors were latinised by the Catholic clergy. Among the Russians of Great Russia, it is only the aristocrats who have had a European education for several generations who speak the European languages well.

      The Russian bourgeois find the study of foreign languages enormously difficult. They learn them at school for seven years, and when they leave can barely manage to say a few sentences, and do not understand the simplest books. Their accent is deplorable. The Russian language, which has hardly anything in common with the European tongues, is rather a hindrance than a help to linguistic studies.

      The emigration of my ancestors to Ukrainia softened their somewhat harsh Northern character, and awoke the dormant poetry of their hearts. Of all the Slav countries which form the Russian Empire, Ukrainia is certainly the most poetic. When one comes from Petrograd to Kiew, one feels oneself in the South. The evenings are warm, the streets full of pedestrians who sing, laugh, and eat in the open air, at tables on the pavement outside the cafes. We breathe the perfumed air of the South, we look at the moon which silvers the poplars; the heart dilates, one becomes a poet for the moment. Everything breathes poetry in this softly undulating plain bathed in happy simshine. Blue rivers flow serene and unhasting seawards; httle lakes sleep softly, girdled by flowers; it is good to dream in the rich forests of oak. All is poetry in Ukrainia: the costumes of the peasants, their songs, their dances, and above all their theatre. Ukrainia is the only country in Europe which possesses a theatre created by the people themselves and not arranged by the intellectuals to develop the taste of the masses, as elsewhere. The Ukrainian theatre is so essentially popular that it has not even been possible to make a bourgeois theatre of it. In early days Ukrainia was in close contact with the Greek colonies on the shores of the Black Sea. Some Greek blood flows in the veins of the Ukrainians, manifesting itself in their charming sunburnt faces and their graceful movements. It may even be that the Ukrainian theatre is a distant echo of the drama so beloved of the ancient Greeks.

      Emerging from the dark forests and dank marshes of Lithuania, my ancestors must have been dazzled by the light, the flowers, the Greek poetry of Ukrainia. Their hearts warmed by the southern sunshine, they began to write verses. My grandfather Mihail carried a little of this Ukrainian poetry in his poor student's wallet when he fled from his father's house, and kept it carefully as a souvenir of his distant home. Later, he handed it on to his two elder sons, Mihail and Fyodor. These youths composed verses, epitaphs and poems; in his youth my father wrote Venetian romances and historical dramas. He began by imitating Gogol, the great Ukrainian writer, whom he greatly admired. In Dostoyevsky's first works we note a good deal of this naive sentimental and romantic poetry. It was not until after his imprisonment, when he became Russian, that we find in his novels the breadth of view and depth of thought proper to the Russian nation, the nation of great genius and a great future. And yet it is not right to say that Dostoyevsky's powerful realism is essentially Russian. The Russians are not realists; they are dreamers and mystics. They love to lose themselves in visions instead of studying life. When they try to be realists, they fall at once into Mongolian cynicism and eroticism. Dostoyevsky's realism is an inheritance from his normanised ancestors. All writers of Norman blood are distinguished by their profound realism. It was not for nothing that Dos-toyevsky admired Balzac so heartily, and took him as his model.

      The Dostoyevsky family was essentially a family of nomads. We find them now in Lithuania, now in Ukrainia, now domiciled in Moscow, now in Petersburg. This is not surprising, for Lithuania is distinguished